Watch the video. It's very interesting, despite being annoying. His statement that the Democratic party has embraced the politics of hand holding sums it up. He correctly sees that the Democrats have no comprehension of the most dynamic and creative elements of our society, and that the Democrats are failing because of that disconnect. He also correctly sees that Obama made a fundamental mistake by emphasizing health care over education.

His sense of what should replace this failure is quite confused, but the diagnosis of the source of the failure is brilliantly stated.

The Harvard education today seems to consist of learning how to pretend non existent facts and then reason from them to any desired result with a tone of great profound authority.

Another way to understand that is Stalin's favorite comment that, " it doesn't matter how the voters vote (he facts), but it only matters who has the power to count the votes (the pretenders of substitute facts.)

Allie, have you forgotten about his epic pants crease? Have you lost that tingle up your leg too. Do you want the oceans to stop rising or not? Don't quit on him now. He's still everything he was the first time, and now he has experience. You have to admit that whatever he was, he's better now. Why would anyone change their vote now?

-- John Donne memorized his sermons each week, and they are far longer than this in the speaking. But still, this was mnemosynically impressive. Unless, of course, his irritation for POTUS does not extend to TOTUS.

-- the reverb: you cannot tell whether it was an attempt by the producer to exalt him to Mosaic status, or it is self-deification, but it contributes strongly to the annoyance.

-- positioning him off center calls attention, unfavorable attention, to the asymmetry of his features. Yet weirder, the right-center position diverts attention to the shadowed portrait in the back-center, and it looks for all the honest world to see like a picture of the face of Spiderman.

Unger is an interesting guy. I took a course from him in law school. I wasn't completely blown away by him (he took a long time to get to the point, even by law school standards), but he was someone who didn't simply follow the "everything would be better if we just elected more Kennedys" version of liberalism that was common at HLS, and that was refreshing.

The observation about how "most of his list of complaints could pretty much come from a Tea Partier" isn't a surprising one. I once asked him whether the whole Critical Legal Studies method of analysis that he was identified with necessarily led to left-wing political ends, because it seemed to me that libertarians and secular conservatives could just as easily use it to critique modern liberalism. He agreed that was the case, which is something more than many of his acolytes would be willing to acknowledge. He's an intellectually honest person, if a little opaque in his rhetorical style.

A substantial part of the left - viz, the progressive left, aka firebaggers - has opposed Obama from the very start. Heck, it started when Obama asked that awful righty pastor to speak at his inauguration. IOW, it firebagger opposition to Obama began before he was even President.

I would like to know what he means there. Charity is a virtue; justice is also a virtue. Ordinarily charity is held to be one of the three highest virtues. We are all lucky it's held to be superior to justice, because if we all got our just deserts it would be kind of unpleasant.

I understand the law prof actually gave a critique grounded in reason, but the first thing I thought of was he was being trotted out as one of those creatures of the left or right actually 100% in the bag for the Presidential contender...but pretending they hate them because he is not extreme enough.

Pastor Billy Bob - "Reagan is just too soft and wishy washy for me. He isn't born again, he doesn't believe the literal word of the Bible about Noah's flood and the earth only being created in a Day. And he won't nuke the Commies to hell and Give Humanity Freedom!"

Rev Jesse - "Thats what I hate about Bill Clinton...he doesn't acknowledge Sista Soulja is morally superior by her blackness and he dissed her".

Wall Street Bundler - "I have grave doubts about Bush keeping his word to the Freedom Lovers of Wall Street that they can best police themselves..Bush is a very intelligent, hands on guy who should just get the tax cuts he promised done and leave us alone. Let his vast mind and endless energy be channeled into more productive pursuits.....I still won't vote for him."

"Prof Unger - "Obama is just too centrist, too concerned with giving people great stuff - and not about the true Left agenda. In many ways, he is a conservative, even. I would rather vote in some non-centrist."

The interesting thing to me is that post at HuffPo has 18,000+ comments. Yowza!

I wonder how that stacks up to other HuffPo posts (I'm not a regular there so I don't know what's normal or average)? But that's a lot of comments. When a thread gets that long it seems to me it's fairly pointless to jump in and post because it's like a drop of water in an ocean and what real difference will it make. You could never keep up with a thread like that.

The simple fact is that no law professors have acquired any particular policy expertise as a direct consequence of their training. They're just lawyers who are better than most at writing papers that the students who edit law reviews want to publish.

So this guy really isn't any more interesting or insightful or qualified to pontificate on public policy issues than is Robert Cook or any other blog commenter who can compose a coherent paragraph or two.

No offense intended to Althouse, or any other law profs who are actually interesting to read, but their claim to a general capacity for widely applicable critical thinking does not invest them with any particular competence in policy analysis.

Elizabeth Warren is, of course, the most flagrant current example of the unwarranted presumption of law professors. I've seen no evidence that she understands anything much about the actual workings of credit markets, but that lack of understanding doesn't seem to impede her ability to command an audience of her fellow law profs.

Well at least we can discuss Unger, Hunger, whatever. An atomic cloud appeared over China last week, but when two bloggers talked about it, they were arrested. You have to wait until the government identifies it, and then fall in line. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/17/giant-mushroom-cloud-beijing_n_1603780.html

Don't tell me Cookie isn't proud of Obamamnesty? One more nail in the coffin of those dreadful white oppressors who so richly deserve to be minoritized. That's got to score Barry points with Cookie. In fact in Cookieworld I'd call Obamamnesty a roaring success.

"But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for."

The correct response to which, of course, is, "So what did all those taxes I paid go for then?" If the gas taxes I paid weren't used to build roads, what were they used for? If my taxes didn't go to operate schools, what were they spent on? If the taxes I've paid all those years weren't used to run the police and fire departments where did they go? I'd like an answer to that question.

I didn't want to make an adverse comment because I thought that he might be a recovering stroke victim. But apparently, that's the way he really talks. How self involved in your own thought processes you must be to develop a speaking style like that. My ears waxed over. The guy looks totally humourless and he has probably never lost a classroom argument in his life. Intimidating students is his last remaining sensual pleasure.

Another annoying, high-IQ jackass. Could not watch but a few painful minutes. I'm tempted to think he got hired because of some obscure Cherokee expertise. But he does nail Obama as a dorm-room bullshit artist and crony capitalist.

I've stated it many times, but I'll repeat once again for ricpic's benefit:

I have never been a partisan of Obama, and I did not vote for him in 2008. I stood in line for an hour on a chilly November morning before work just to vote for...Ralph Nader, (or against Obama and McCain, if one prefers to see it that way).

•"His policy is a financial confidence game of food stamps." •"He has spent trillions of dollars to rescue the moneyed bundlers and unions." •"He has delivered his policies to the rulers of money." •"He has reduced economic policy to an empty appeal to tax." •"He has reduced justice to political theater." •"He has subordinated the broadening of economic opportunity." •"He has evoked a politics of racism without a struggle."

I have never been a partisan of Obama, and I did not vote for him in 2008. I stood in line for an hour on a chilly November morning before work just to vote for...Ralph Nader, (or against Obama and McCain, if one prefers to see it that way)

No matter. These idiots will turn around in the next comment claiming Obama is an far left leftist alien Marxist KenyanHitler Negrofacist.

REMEMBER: Obama is a ruthless and cunning Chicago style strategist, but a total weak inexperienced fuck-up at the same time!

Say what you will about Cook, IMO he's someone who largely argues honestly and in good faith, with intellectual consistency and integrity (though I disagree with him 98% of the time). E.g. he's as tough on Obama as he is on Bush, evaluating them by the same standards (though I usually disagree with Cook's standards and criteria).

So please, Garage, your siding with Cook against "these idiots" disingenuously misses the point-- the relevant distinction between you and Cook. Have you *ever* criticized Obama for anything? Have you ever reacted to any criticism of Obama or Democrats proffered by commenters here with anything other than knee-jerk snarky anti-Republican/ anti-conservative insults? Do you ever criticize Democrats here?

Whoever you consider the most partisan right-wing "idiots" here, I'd wager they've been at least 10X as critical of Republicans (e.g. Romney or Boehner or Bush or McCain or RINOs or Tea Partiers or Santorum or whoever) in their comments as you've ever been of Democrats.

You mocking Republicans or conservatives for blind partisanship is the pot calling the kettle wingnut.

NB I'm not saying Cook's "pox on both their houses," voting for Nader thing is superior to partisanship. There are excellent reasons to be partisan, exigent reasons to be partisan, especially in this election.

But for the most knee-jerk of partisans to mock others for their partisanship is sheer hypocrisy.

"Obama is not declaring himself dictator and ridding himself of the people who claim he must follow the rule of law----all that would allow leftist perfection, such as in Cuba, to rule. Therefore, he is not a true leftist."

I believe it was Milton Friedman who said that every dollar of government expenditure must be made up by a dollar from private taxation. There is no free lunch no matter how much politicians try to mask the consequences.

"I believe it was Milton Friedman who said that every dollar of government expenditure must be made up by a dollar from private taxation. There is no free lunch no matter how much politicians try to mask the consequences."

Who is trying to claim there is such a thing as a "free lunch?" No one. This is a fundamental function of government...to make decisions regarding how to allocate public funds--that is, how to spend tax revenues.

RCook, You misunderstand both RogerJ's point and the relation b/w taxes and spending.

Roger's point is simply that the resource demands placed on the economy by the government correspond to its level of spending rather than to current tax revenues. This is why it's usually pointless to talk about tax cuts without talking about spending cuts.

The larger point is that the task of fiscal policy is to determine simultaneously what spending projects will be undertaken and what taxes will be imposed to fund those projects. It's not a question of watching tax revenues roll in and then deciding how to distribute the goodies. The benefits of any government project should, ideally, be worth the economic burden of the taxes necessary to finance it.

Whatever the govt spends is a bill that will ultimately be paid by tax payers, the govt hopes that somehow increased revenues will be paid for their profilgacy--but the bill ultimately has to be paid by the taxpayers.

Unger looms large in Kloppenberg's Reading Obama as one of Obama's key mentors. Unger is a Brazilian (from Rio). I thought that Obama's giveaway to Brazil of billions in debt was his tip of the hat to Unger. Of course, it wasn't Obama's money. But even this wasn't enough for Unger. Unger is a jokey way of saying Hunger.

Assuming that Unger or one of his acolytes wrote the bulk of his wiki page, I think a pretty good appraisal of his pomposity-to-substance ratio can be made on the basis of his analysis of mathematics:

One consequence of these positions that Unger points to is the revision of the concept and function of mathematics. If there is only one world drenched in time through and through, then mathematics cannot be a timeless expression of multiple universes that captures reality. Rather, Unger argues that mathematics is a means of analyzing the world removed of time and phenomenal distinction. By emptying the world of time and space it is able to better focus on one aspect of reality: the recurrence of certain ways in which pieces of the world relate to other pieces. Its subject matter are the structured wholes and bundles of relations, which we see outside mathematics only as embodied in the time-bound particulars of the manifest world. In this way, mathematics extends our problem solving powers as an extension of human insight, but it is not a part of the world.

Robert Cook said..."Heck, even Richard Nixon was more left than Obama."

Funny comment. The biggest problem with Obama is that he represents the weighted average of the lefties that call the shots for the dems and, of course, he is the dem prez and must be defeated.

You get preoccupied with precise definitions re: socialism and communism, etc. and how Obama's philosophy does not fit these definitions.

The reality is that the precise details of the definitions don't matter much. The big picture is that lefties/dems want to expand the government as much and as fast as possible. The lefties want to do it for ideological reasons. The dems want to do it because eventually the gov will get so big and powerful and so many people will depend on it that it will be impossible for the GOP to win a nation wide election. A country where one party wins all the national elections is effectively a dictatorship.

What is amazing is that a smart guy like you does not understand that expanding the power and size of the fed gov that is already too big and too powerful is a serious threat to our liberty. My impression is that ostensibly intelligent lefties (most academics, for example) are sorely lacking common sense and tend to get lost in the minutiae at the cost of understanding the big picture.

"A country where one party wins all the national elections is effectively a dictatorship."

Hmmm...in the last 20 years, we've had a two-term Democratic President, followed by a two-term Republican President, followed now by a Democratic President still in his first term. Priot to that, we had a one-term Republican President who was preceded by a two-term Republican President.

One can hardly say the Democrats have come anywhere near accomplishing a monopoly on winning "all the national elections."

That aside, the Dems and Republicans are virtually the same party, with mere surface differences, mainly rhetorical. They both serve Wall Street and neither serves the interests of the citizenry.

Way to ignore the main point that our fed gov is so large that it is a profound threat to our liberty. How do you not understand the threat that the fed gov poses to our democracy?

It does not matter what combination of socialism, communism, crony capitalism, fascism, etc is the political philosophy of the dems. What does matter is that our too huge, too powerful central government is an ever growing threat to our liberty. Power is a zero sum game. The more powerful the feds get, the less powerful the rest of us are.

As the percentage of the electorate that is bought off either by direct payments (gov workers, welfare, etc) or is treated preferentially by the dem gov (privileged interest groups (PIGs)) grows, it becomes increasingly difficult for the GOP to win a national election. There is a tipping point.

The dems haven't achieved their goal yet of electoral domination but, obviously, the time to stop them is before they succeed (afterwards is too late).

The statement that there is no difference between the dems and the GOP is wrong. The dems and the GOP are quite different. Two thirds of Republicans are conservative and they have created a political movement, the Tea Party, that is vigorously pulling the GOP in the conservative direction. Most GOP voters are strenuously agitating to reduce the size and power of the fed gov.

The corrupt dem party is primarily interested in growing gov to help it win elections and siphoning off public funds to be dispersed to dem PIGs.

Obviously many GOP pols have played the same game in the past but the Tea Party is effectively pressuring these non conservative GOP pols by primarying them.

If our government served the people, its size would be of small concern. As the government serves Wall Street and the ruling class--both parties, which you wish to ignore...in neither party is there haven--its size is certainly of concern, but even a smaller government in service to the ruling class would be a threat.

Our system is broken, and we have a representative republic in crude appearance only. Count on things getting much worse.